Hi Tim, > ...my son has been told he needs to download Visual Studio 2017 onto > a Windows PC...
> Are there any options other than spending several hundred pounds on > a new PC to run this bloatware for compiling programs. MonoDevelop is probably the closest equivalent to Visual Studio on Linux, supporting most of the same languages and libraries (or drop in replacements; i.e. Mono instead of .NET). For console programs or those using third party libraries for graphics (e.g. MonoGame) it's more or less equivalent. However, last I looked, the GUI builder in MonoDevelop only supports GTK GUIs, unlike Visual Studio. So, for GUI programs, you probably want to stick to one IDE or the other. I've run Visual Studio on Windows 7 in VirtualBox, and it is usable with 4GB RAM and VT-x hardware acceleration. It is one of the slower applications though. It takes ages to load on real hardware too, but once it's going it feels a bit more responsive. And of course if you're not booting Windows every day, the first thing it's going to do when you boot up your virtual machine is run Windows Update in the background and bog itself down for several minutes doing whatever it is that Windows Update does that takes so much time and effort. Patrick. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2018-10-02 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk / CHECK IF YOU'RE REPLYING Reporting bugs well: http://goo.gl/4Xue / TO THE LIST OR THE AUTHOR
